Extract: Lady Macbeth’s ‘Unsex me here’ soliloquy (Act 1 scene 5)
Question: Starting with this speech, explain how far you think Shakespeare presents Lady
Macbeth as a powerful woman.
Response:
Shakespeare uses Lady Macbeth as a construct to explore the effects of power in
the hands of women and to present power as a dangerous and destructive force when
combined with ambition outside of the parameters of the established ‘natural order’ or
accepted Chain of Being.
Shakespeare presents Lady Macbeth as a powerful woman right from her first
appearance in the play. She is given a soliloquy which reveals to the audience that she is
determined to make herself as powerful as possible in order to support her husband in
gaining the throne. The repetition of the imperative verb “Come” reflects her
determination to grasp power by any means necessary – she summons “spirits” to her
“woman’s breasts” to make her more masculine, to take her “milk for gall”. The idea that
she wishes to remove her femininity and replace it with “gall” would be shocking to a
Jacobean audience, who viewed women as mothers and caregivers and as people who
should be guided by their husbands. The noun “gall” implies she wishes her female
qualities to be made poisonous, which would give her the strength and power of a man.
This also contrasts her statement about Macbeth in her previous soliloquy, where she
expressed concerns that he was “too full o’th’milk of human kindness” to commit the
regicide she is planning to increase their power. By attributing “milk” to him and turning
hers to “gall”, Shakespeare is showing that she is attempting to reverse their genders –
this shows that she is powerful at the start but, over the course of the play, this power
diminishes as she has contravened the Chain of Being by summoning such masculine
power and so Shakespeare shows that she is punished for this – “the queen, my lord, is
dead”. She dies an off-stage death at her own hand, indicating how little power she has
by the end of the play. Shakespeare also shows how she is powerful through her
willingness to exploit her gender when necessary – she deflects attention from Macbeth
as Duncan’s body is discovered and he over-reacts with a faint – “Help me hence, ho!”
This pretended weakness is actually a sign of her power as she is manipulating the men
around her.
Shakespeare has deliberately chosen to show Lady Macbeth summoning “spirits”
and “murdering ministers” to “unsex” her in order to show his contemporary audience
that she is going against God – calling supernatural “spirits” would have been shocking
to a Christian audience – in order to gain this power and so the audience would expect to
see this power used in evil ways and to see it lead to her downfall. Furthermore, showing
Lady Macbeth summoning “spirits” is an indication that Shakespeare is linking Lady
Macbeth to the supernatural characters of the play, the powerful but evil witches.
Aligning Lady Macbeth with witches would have horrified James I, the monarch who was
Shakespeare’s patron and who was famously obsessed with destroying witchcraft, and
would have signified that Lady Macbeth’s power would be malignant and destructive to
the other characters – she is described in the final scene as a “fiend-like queen”, with the
adjective “fiend-like” signifying her connections to the devil.
Shakespeare also shows Lady Macbeth disguising her power with “thick night”,
“smoke of hell”, “the blanket of the dark”. Using this semantic field of darkness shows
that she has been corrupted by power. The concept of hiding evil deeds with darkness so
“heaven” cannot “peep through”, or God cannot see, also becomes a motif Shakespeare
uses throughout the play, the idea of deception. Lady Macbeth encourages her husband
to metaphorically “look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under’t”. This would
be shocking to an audience who have just witnessed the Gunpowder Plot as the
attempted treason is fresh in their memories and the idea of grasping power in this way
would be shocking. The noun “serpent” also has Biblical connotations of devils and the
Garden of Eden and reminds the audience that power corrupts women.
